On one of my walks in Denver, I met Stan and Mary — owners of the lovely patio that I mentioned in my last post, the one with the burgeoning tomato in what looked to be a 20 or 30-gallon pot. Here’s Stan with the monster, which I learned has one “Sweet 100,” one beefsteak and one “Early Girl”:

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No little weenie pot-tomato varieties for these urbanites! Mary was even growing a cabbage in a pot, one that a student at the school she teaches at had left behind after a biology project. They also had some lovely container combinations, including one for all of their culinary herbs.

And Stan and Mary didn’t buy their tomatoes this big from a greenhouse. They got them small, in April, and carefully brought them indoors during all those cold spring nights. Now they have them in a nice warm corner and have already harvested ripe fruit.

You CAN garden anywhere. You just have to have desire.

Meanwhile, when I wrote about clay soil,reader Jackie Swenson commiserated, uniquely evoking the color — and texture — of the stuff that coats boots, shovels, and the roots of unlucky plants here:

“Peanut butter/cement,” she called it.

Yup. That’s the stuff! The stuff I used to despair of ever getting out of my sneakers after walking the dog near an irrigation ditch. The stuff that resists the blade of gardening tools with a “tang” sound that almost sounds like rock. Here’s Jackie’s tale:

“When we moved here from the east coast I was appalled at the peanut butter/cement soil that our garden had. I soon learned that if I added coffee grounds and banana peels, cut up, to the soil it got better in a hurry. We have just sold that house that has a beautiful garden and yard. Now we have a new garden to cope with, and I’m adding the same things to the soil. It’s improving rapidly. Also, crushed eggshells are good to add. They supply calcium and deter small animals and bugs from walking across the soil.

Now, my animals are not small — one Alaskan husky, one motley, muttley terrier — but I found the eggshells to be a lure to them, not a deterrent! Jackie answered:

“I think that the coffee grounds repel the cats, not the egg shells. I also have heard that orange peels repel cats when mixed with the coffee grinds. I haven’t tried that. We don’t have a compost pile any longer because the compost attracted rats. Maybe the dryness had something to do with it. It also took a long time to decompose. I just throw the grinds and banana peels on the ground. Then I turn the banana peels in around the roses. I have great roses. I also dead head them and fertilize them regularly. At our old house I haven’t cared for the roses and they were great again this year.”

I have the same problem with compost, and I have one of the big round bins that you can easily turn. What you CAN’T do with it is continually add compost and expect to take out a finished product. So you’d need at least two of these, not one — one to add to and one to allow to “cook.” Moisture is certainly a problem here for compost. I’m lucky if I get around to watering my plants, let alone my compost turner!

Has anyone out there taken a composting class? A lot of cities and municipalities offer them. And one Saturday this spring, the city of Loveland was selling, at half price, the big square composters, the ones that let you take finished compost out of the bottom of the bin, all the while adding more stuff to the top. I think I need one of those!

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.